Have you ever considered that your voice is an instrument and your thoughts and beliefs are the music you’re playing? If you want to learn how to “tune” your voice, take a listen to my guest appearance on the new episode of the More than a Few Words podcast, hosted by Lorraine Ball.(More Than a Few Words Podcast with Lorraine Ball, September 2021)
Recently, Tina joined Lorraine Ball on the More than a Few Words podcast to talk about how to use your voice to deepen your connection with others, enhance your credibility, and strengthen your leadership.
In this episode:
You'll discover the 5-7 different vocal qualities that are highly associated with credibility, trustworthiness, and perceptions of leadership
How these elements impact your career and income
Techniques to sound more professional, confident, and knowledgable
Lorraine BallHave you ever thought about what an amazing instrument your voice is? How the tone, the pitch and the tempo of your speaking voice can change how people view you? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, here's the show. Welcome to More Than a Few Words – a marketing conversation for business owners. MTFW is part of your digital toolbox and this is your host, Lorraine Ball. I grew up in New York. I have a slightly nasal New York accent. That's part of my voice. But over the years, I've certainly worked to try to moderate that. And it is important that you do, because you can create an impression with your voice. That's what we're going to talk about today. And I couldn't think of a better person to have this conversation with than Tina Dietz. Tina's an award-winning and internationally-acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, corporate podcast producer, and vocal leadership expert. She has been featured on media outlets, including ABC, INC.com, Huffington Post, and Forbes.Tina's first podcast, The StartSomething Show, was named by INC Magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs. Her company, Twin Flames Studios, amplifies the influence of brands and leaders through high ROI audiobook and podcasting solutions. Tina, welcome to the show!
Tina DietzThanks, Lorraine. I really appreciate you having me on.
I am so excited to have you here, because this is something I've worked on a lot over the years and I think it's really important. But why don't we start with the question: What are the important qualities of someone's voice that makes them an effective leadership voice?
There’s about seven different qualities that are highly associated with someone's credibility, trustworthiness, and perception of leadership when it comes to vocal qualities. And the research around this is a little bit astounding. For example, Duke University did a study of almost 1000 CEOs, and found that on the topic of pitch alone, CEOs who had a lower pitch to their voice, had more tenure, commanded larger companies, had more perception of credibility and leadership, and made more money to the tune on average of an additional $180,000 per year.
And, you know, I know a lot of women like myself are like, “Crap!” You know, that's not necessarily a good statistic for us. But it's not that alone. The most highly, highly, highly associated vocal characteristic with credibility, leadership, trustworthiness is tempo. And this isn’t a particular tempo, it's your natural tempo. And this has to do with how we perceive somebody's breathing and their natural rhythm—the rhythm of their voice. So if you're, if you're talking a little bit too fast, and you're kind of gasping a little bit and all of that, that shows that you're maybe a little more anxious or nervous or not present. If you're talking slow, and a lot of pauses, then that may show that, again, you're not present and not confident or not sure of what you're saying. So those are two aspects of vocal qualities that really have been shown in research to make a difference. Other ones are sonority, which is the pleasantness of one's voice, articulation, as well as flow. And flow and tempo and articulation all kind of go together, as well.
And, you know, I know a lot of women like myself are like, “Crap!” You know, that's not necessarily a good statistic for us. But it's not that alone. The most highly, highly, highly associated vocal characteristic with credibility, leadership, trustworthiness is tempo. And this isn’t a particular tempo, it's your natural tempo. And this has to do with how we perceive somebody's breathing and their natural rhythm—the rhythm of their voice. So if you're, if you're talking a little bit too fast, and you're kind of gasping a little bit and all of that, that shows that you're maybe a little more anxious or nervous or not present. If you're talking slow, and a lot of pauses, then that may show that, again, you're not present and not confident or not sure of what you're saying. So those are two aspects of vocal qualities that really have been shown in research to make a difference. Other ones are sonority, which is the pleasantness of one's voice, articulation, as well as flow. And flow and tempo and articulation all kind of go together, as well.
So that's really reassuring to someone like me, because as soon as you started talking about it, I heard the deeper bass tone, having come out of a corporate environment, lots of men, I'm like, “Of course that sounds better to their ears.” And that's something that's really hard for me to change. But I can work on the flow, the pacing, some of those other qualities that make me sound more confident.
Exactly. But you know, and the good news is, is that everybody's voice is like a fingerprint. It's unique to us. So if you have an unusual voice, it doesn't mean that you have to fit into a cookie-cutter situation to be unique. You just need to be more of yourself. And the more that you work your voice out like a muscle, like you would take care of your body—it's a very complex musculature in there and your lungs and your throat and your neck and your shoulders, your face, everything combined—you know this, this beautiful orchestra happening inside of your body to get your voice out into the world. If you pay attention to it and work it out, it'll do wonderful things for you.
As a business owner, I'm thinking, “Okay, I'm not going to be doing big presentations, I'm not going to be standing in front of a room of 100 people. Does my voice really matter?”
Yes, yes, it does. It absolutely does. Because business is all about relationships. And every relationship you form, whether it's with a prospective client, it's with colleagues, it's at a networking group, it's on a phone call, it doesn't matter, you bring your voice with you everywhere you go. And you owe it to yourself, and you owe it to the growth of your business, your company, to bring your voice with you and to have it be a representation of who you are as a leader, and who you are as a brand.
Do you think that you have a different voice when you're at home or at work? Is it one voice? Or does it change based on the situation? And those are obviously the two extremes, but does your voice change in different situations?
Yeah, yeah, I think it does. Because we have a range, right? Just like you have a vocal range low to high, we also have a range of expression. And sometimes the expression that you use in business is not necessarily going to be the same expression you use with your kids.
That being said, I think most people draw two strong boundaries between what's in business, and what's really in your heart. And the more integrated we become from the inside and the outside, the more effective we become as leaders. So vocal leadership isn't really all about the external voice, it's about the dance between your internal voice and your external voice. It's analogous to a virtuoso musician. So, if you imagine your external voice is the instrument you're playing, and your internal voice—your thoughts, your beliefs, your message, all the things that make you who you are—that's the music that you're playing. So if you can learn how to create the arrangement of the music that you're playing, and pay attention to the external instrument, that's when you become a virtuoso.
Wow, I love the comparison between your voice and an instrument, because it really, to me, it makes a lot of sense. I can see that whole tuning and being pleasant to the ear. And even jazz sometimes is appealing to a certain audience. So I like that analogy, because it can be… your voice needs to fit the situation, it also needs to be kind of true to who you are. Are there things that we do with our voice that really work against us? That send the wrong message?
We could do it pretty easily. There's two in particular that in a business setting, and we're talking specifically about leadership and credibility, that are credibility killers. One is vocal fry. Now, if you don't know what vocal fry is, you can think about the Kardashians. So it basically makes you sound uninterested. And you actually will hear a lot of this in advertising when they're advertising to millennials and younger. Generally, when they're advertising to Gen X and older, you won't hear near as much vocal fry as you would, because it's more typical to hear in the younger generations, and they don't react to it as much as older generations do. So I do think we'll see this changing, but it's at the end of the sentences and it gets dropped down really low. And in the research that's been done—Gonzaga University did a huge study on this—regardless of who was evaluating the interviewees, anyone who was being interviewed that used vocal fry in their voice across the board categorically—age, race, gender didn't matter—they were rated as less credible and less desirable, less trustworthy to take a job. So it's a huge thing in career development: don't have vocal fry in your voice. That's a really big one.
And the other one that is similar—same thing, but different—is up talking the end of your sentences. And up talking the end of your sentences kind of makes you sound not credible, and then people think you don't know what you're doing, because your sentences sound like a question. A lot of times you can't hear it when you're doing it yourself, so you have to have other people listen to you. This happens a lot in networking situations when somebody is introducing themselves and they feel uncertain on the inside and that gets reflected to the outside. So a good thing to take note of.
Awesome. So as we're wrapping this up, I really want to encourage people to check out Twin Flames Studios—lots of S's in there for me to practice. But I really want to encourage people to check out all the wonderful information you've got to learn more about this subject, because I think being able to communicate and communicate with confidence is such an important first step for everyone and especially for business owners.
It sure is. We actually have a vocal leadership workout. If anyone is interested. And we don't have a landing page for it, but if you connect with me on LinkedIn, or through our website. We're happy to send you a copy.
Awesome. Well, we will make sure that we include all those links. Thank you so much for being a part of the show.
Thank you, Lorraine. This is wonderful. I appreciate you.
If you've enjoyed today's conversation and you'd like to find more resources for your business, be sure to check out the Digital Toolbox at DigitalToolbox.Club. Look for MTFW wherever you listen to podcasts. This is another episode of More Than a Few Words. Thanks for listening.
I invite you to join Julia Steele and me at the VID19 Conference and learn how to strengthen your voice of leadership in uncertain times
Hi, everyone, and welcome to day eight of the VID19 Conference. My name is Julia Steele, I'm the creator and host. I cannot believe we are on day eight already, but days are flying by and the feedback has been absolutely brilliant. So, thank you so much for everyone that has reached out to me and the other contributors. It's great to see you all getting so much value from this conference.
It's traditional in Australia to acknowledge the land that we stand on at the start of every conference. So, given we are on a new day, I am just going to acknowledge that I am standing on the land of the Wurundjeri people, of the Kulin Nation. I extend… Sorry, I, I'll start again. I want to acknowledge the land, the land that I stand on, and the people of the Wurundjeri in the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders: past, present and emerging. I also extend that to all First Nations people that may be joining from around Australia, and overseas as well.
We are joined by the wonderful Tina Dietz. She joins us all the way from Florida. I just love that this is getting more international by the minute.
So, Tina, thank you so much for joining us. And you're gonna help us sort of explore and strengthen our voice, you know, while we lead through these uncertain times. So I can't wait to, to see where you take us with this. And thanks, again, for joining from Florida.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Anytime we can reach out to each other across the globe, it's always a privilege. So I really appreciate that.
Okay, so leading in uncertain times.
I know, Julia, you speak a lot on this as well. So, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Just to share a little bit about myself.
I've been an entrepreneur for many, many years, many decades, I grew up as one. And I also found myself trained as a therapist. I have been in business for a couple of decades building businesses around the world, more than 20 different industries, and about eight or nine different countries now and counting.
And my company, Twin Flames Studios, works with leaders, executives, trusted brands, and entrepreneurs to help amplify your voice and your message not just to your audience, but also to your team, to new people who are looking to find you. And we do that through audiobooks. We do that through podcasting. And we also do that through what we're going to talk about today, which is vocal leadership. And a lot of people haven't heard about vocal leadership. So, I'll explain more about what that means in just a couple of minutes.
But you know, with everything going on, I'm just, it's funny, I think this is about my—I've always used Zoom a lot, my company has always been mobile so I feel very fortunate. And this time to already be in a place to help other people work with online formats, work with audio formats, because this is what I've been doing now for more than a decade. And it's… But sometimes I am on Zoom so much I question that I actually have a lower half to my body. And it gets a little weird after a while. It's like, “Do I exist from the waist down? I'm not entirely sure.” And I'm also pretty sure that the unofficial tagline of Zoom is “Zoom: Pants optional.” So I don't know if you're wearing pants joining us here today. You don't have to because you're not on camera. Actually, I don't have to either. But I am, I assure you.
But what we're gonna be talking about today, just to—And I'm super curious if you want to put into the chat, anything about what brought you here today? Where you're from? I'm monitoring the chat. So, I will definitely be taking questions as we go along—If there's something that comes up. My preference is to be highly, highly interactive in everything that we're doing here, because the best way that I can serve you is by covering those areas and covering those topics that are going to be most relevant to you. So, as we're going along, if something pops up for you, please do put it in the chat, ask questions again, feel free to introduce yourself, so we kind of know who's out there. We had a really lovely turnout for this today. And I'm excited to get to know you as well.
So how to strengthen your voice of leadership in uncertain times, and what exactly is vocal leadership, and what makes it important?
So vocal leadership encompasses a wide range of topics. And this includes
Your personal vocal mechanics—which we'll talk some about today.
The dynamics of communication
Team communication
It's present in meetings and presentations—when you're live and in person, and you can actually, you know, touch elbows, things like that. It's present when you're in online presentations like this. It is also present in your speaking peer to peer and networking. Anytime that you're using your voice, vocal leadership is present.
The two areas that we don't think about our voices being present, but they are very much present are
The voice of your message or your brand
And how you know who you are and what you stand for—and your values come through that particular modality of your voice.
And the very most important part of vocal leadership, which is your inner voice, and what that tells you, how that informs you because that inner voice that you have—or maybe it's lots of voices, as I can attest to myself. That is one of the things we're also going to discuss today is that inner voice as well as the outer voice—so meetings, presentations, sales conversations, conventions, conflict resolution, performance review, team collaboration, vocal leadership encompasses all of these areas and has a significant impact on your performance on the culture, on everything that happens.
And the two areas we're going to focus on today to help you be the calm in the storm, are:
The mechanics of some vocal leadership technique to help you lead during meetings and conversations. And these are going to be useful to you in any situation where you're the “leader”—I'm putting that in air quotes, because some of these situations, we don't think of ourselves as leaders. Certainly working with our teams or working with clients, working with freelancers, any of those areas, sure. But you may also be having a leadership role in parenting, taking on being a leader or holding a space of calm in your other relationships with friends or in the community.
And we're also going to be covering ways that you can manage your own inside voice, your internal conversations and habits about what happens, you know, inside of you as you're looking to communicate with other people.
And the key to vocal leadership is aligning these inside and outside voices, being congruent. And that's truly where authenticity lives. And if we're looking to truly be leaders, then authenticity is where we must stand as much as possible at all times.
So, when we start with the vocal leadership mechanics, there are four factors we're going to focus on today—there are far more than that. But the four factors we're going to focus on today that have been shown in research to significantly impact how you're perceived as a leader and your credibility, are:
Articulation
Tempo
Flow
Sonority
I'll say that again, articulation, tempo flow and sonority.
Articulationis how clearly you speak, how understandable your words are. And the more articulate you are—not over articulate, because when we're over articulate, we start to sound like a snob, and nobody likes that. Under articulation, of course, kills your credibility because you start to slur your words, you're not understandable, and then people wonder if you really know what you're talking about. But articulation is important. And particularly since we're talking about online meetings, and non-visual meetings, in many cases, articulation is extra important because people need to be able to understand you. And they need to be able to be very clear on what your words are and how you're speaking.
The second area is tempo. And tempo is arguably the most important factor to focus on. Tempo is your natural speaking speed. Now, I live in Florida, but I'm originally from New York. Not New York City, but Buffalo, New York, on the opposite end of the state. But nonetheless, being from, you know, that area, the Northeast, we tend to speak pretty quickly. That's a natural tone for me, I'm never going to be somebody with a lower, slower, more laid-back tone of voice—like you might find from people from the southern US or from other countries where the cadence is much, much slower. So, it's natural for me to have this slightly faster tempo. Your correct tempo is whatever is right for you. And it is, in research, in all the research studies, probably the top factor in what makes you most credible as a leader and what makes you sound most trustworthy.
This is because it has a lot to do with your breathing. Everything comes from the breath. And when we are breathing to shallowly and our voices start to speed up that's an indication on a very biological level that you're nervous, that maybe you're lying, or that you're angry, depending on how you're presenting to people.
On the opposite side of things, if you're halting and your tempo starts to slow down, then you lose people's attention. And they start to fade off. And they're not really focused on what you're saying. And that's a credibility killer as well. So, the most important thing we can do on the mechanic side of things, first of all, number one, is to focus on our breathing. Practicing your breathing—and this can be do through yogic breathing, it can be through something as simple as what I call “The 4-4-4 Breath” and this is where you inhale on a count of four, you hold for a count of four, and you exhale on a count of four. And this helps normalize your breathing, which helps settle your parasympathetic nervous system, and creates more calm throughout your body, which translates—of course—to your brain, and how you're connecting with your audience, or the person you're sitting in front of, or your child, or whoever it is that you're communicating with. And we hear about breathing a lot. But we don't necessarily always take that advice. If we take a few moments, it can make a tremendous difference in how we're perceived by other people.
The fourth factor is flow. And this is how smoothly your words come out of your mouth. This also is indicative of the dreaded “uhms” and “ahhs”. When you're a public speaker or you give a lot of meetings and presentations always tell you, “Oh, you got to watch how many times you say ‘Um,’ and ‘ah.’” The problem with that is that the more you think about “uhms” and “ahhs,” the more you tend to save them. It's like don't think about pink elephants, and there's the elephant, right? So, if you give yourself some room to let go of being concerned about the “uhms” and “ahhs,” the best thing that you can do is focus on the other person instead of what you're saying. Not on their reaction, but in being present to them, even in an audio-only situation. And we'll talk some more a little bit later about how our audio-only—when we're listening—and how audio-only actually can heighten our senses, and how we interact with that, and how we can trust ourselves and our listening when it's audio-only. When we're in a situation where we are listening to other people, focus on them, be present to them, and many times that will get rid of the “uhms” and “ahhs” because those “uhms” and “ahhs” are indicative of our own brain interrupting us trying to get us to say things a certain way, or questioning ourselves in our internal conversation if we're saying the right thing or not. We get worried about “Oh, what do I have to say next?” And that interruption of train of thought can really damage your flow.
So again, coming back to your breath, keeping yourself calmer will help your flow and help get rid of those “uhms” and “ahhs,” and increase your rate of flow for that extra boost of credibility and leadership.
And the last factor we're focused on today is called sonority. Sonority is the pleasantness of your voice. And in truth, most people, the more they practice these other factors—articulation, tempo, flow—the more you take care of your voice, the more your sonority will rise. Not everybody has a naturally super pleasant voice, but you have to work with the voice that you have. That's the only choice that we have—is to work with the voice that we have. And it's a funny thing, when I speak to groups of people—and I'd be curious as to what happens here with this audience—when I ask the question, “How many of you here like the sound of your own voice?” How many people do you think raise their hand? Yeah, pretty much nobody. About 80% of the room will tell me—on any given room—that they do not like the sound of their own voice. And this goes even for podcasters and professional speakers. Even in rooms like that, I'll get 50 to 60% of the room saying “Ehh, I don't like the sound of my own voice. I like my content, I might be able to own my identity as an expert, but the sound of my voice?” Right?
So, it takes something to get used to the sound of your own voice. And truly the only way out in that situation is through, as the old saying goes. You have to listen to yourself back and learn how to appreciate sometimes you just have to get used to it like a habit over and over again—listening to yourself doing interviews on podcasts, listening to yourself just doing recordings are around your house with your own musings, and things like that. And find ways that you can appreciate the voice that you have. Even if you are, you know, find yourself concerned about things like an accent, I'm going to ask you to let that go. Because what makes you unique is your voice.
And if you have any concerns about how understandable you are, then we go back to practicing the things like articulation, and tempo, because all of those things are going to help make your voice more understandable, depending on the audience that you're trying to reach.
So, the other factors around sonority that I wanted to touch on are two credibility killers. And these are far more prevalent in North America than they are in any other part of the world. So, I'm very curious for our audience in Australia if you see this as well. And those two credibility killers are what we call Up Talk and Vocal Fry.
So up talk is where you make every statement sound like a question. And that really makes you sound not credible. Because you make you sound like you don't know what you're doing. And that's an example of what up talk sounds like. Most people will up talk the end of their sentences when they're not entirely sure how their message is going to be received. If you're doing a live networking event, for example, and you have to give a 30-seconds “Hi, my name is so and so. And my business is such and such,” you'll hear a lot of up talk in people sentences, because they're kind of questioning how they're going to be received in the room. This is another good area to ask somebody else, rather than try to figure it out yourself, if this is a habit that you have—it's actually kind of difficult to hear if you do it in the moment, and you can practice will be called downstrokes. So up talk would sound like this: “Hi, my name is Tina Dietz, and my company is Twin Flames Studios. And we help amplify the voices of leaders and authors and companies around the world.” Sounds a little off, right? Speaking that with downstrokes with sounds like this: “Hi, my name is Tina Dietz. And I'm the owner of Twin Flames Studios, where we amplify the voices of leaders and companies and authors all over the world.” Sounds a little different when you get to hear the contrast between the two. So, you can see why that's a bit of a credibility killer.
The other one I mentioned is vocal fry. Now I have a hard time even doing vocal fry because my voice doesn't like to do it. I've trained myself out of it. But if you're familiar with the American celebrities—the Kardashians—these guys are a good example of listening to vocal fry, it makes you sent voice sound like it's a little bit bored or dismissive, because you drop the ends of your sentences down into your throat. And it's kind of a vocal fry kind of sound. You'll also hear this on American radio, on National Public Radio a lot, particularly with the male hosts on shows if you listen to podcasts, you'll hear this quite often in a lot of professional level shows. But the thing is, the reason it's a credibility killer is—and it's not with those guys who are professional hosts or even with the Kardashians—is we're not looking to take advice necessarily from the Kardashians, or from a radio show host who's doing a game show, we're looking to be entertained by them. So, the vocal fry doesn't matter for their credibility because we're not looking for credibility.
But when you take that same vocal fry, and you put it into a situation where somebody's doing a job interview, we find in the research that across the board—regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of race or any other demographic situation—if somebody is giving their answers in a job interview with vocal fry, they are across the board seen as less trustworthy, less credible, and less hirable. So, it is a habit that we do take try to with our leaders try to coach you out of because it can be damaging, particularly if it's done a lot. Here or there you are having a bad voice day, fine. But habitually? Not so good. So those are the two credibility killers with sonority.
Now when we're in a meeting, and you're running something with a team or you're running a program, you can keep these factors in mind. But what's more important is that you practice them ahead of time. So, articulation practicing with things like tongue twisters, and facial exercises are really important.
Tempo, as I mentioned before, the best thing you can do to work with tempo is to work with your breathing. And that tempo piece will flow over—no pun intended—over into the flow and sonority areas as well.
Listening back to yourself as the other best thing you can do for your vocal mechanic so that you can start to identify—And this is not a situation of beating yourself up. This is listening to yourself to say, “Okay, what can I add?” Or “What can I enhance?” Or “How can I create my next level?” That's the conversation that we're in. This is only a conversation between better and best, I never want to hear you beating yourself up for the voice that you have.
And by the way, we have put together a Vocal Leadership Workout for everybody that you can download. And it's got tons of exercises in it, and it also has links to some articles that I wrote for Forbes magazine, and some other places on different aspects of vocal leadership. You can download that we'll put the link in the in the chat as well at TwinFlamesStudios.com/vid19. And that's… I really, really love this vocal workout, I have all my clients do it to get them going. Because we don't think about our voice as the machine that it is, as the muscle that it is. And the neck muscles and the throat muscles around the voice are very complicated. There's a lot of people… You think about it, you have basically a popsicle stick holding up a bowling ball. That's the musculature of your neck. And it's all these crisscrossing tiny little muscles. And if you go to massage your neck or your throat, you can start to feel it like “Holy crap! That's like piano wire in there! That is really, really tight.”
So, allowing yourself… give yourself some throat massage is really, really helpful. We'll talk about that, along with some other techniques a little bit later when we get to talking about managing your inside voice, which we're about to switch to right now.
So, all of that being said about the mechanics of your voice. You know what’s really important? The inside part. Yes, it's important to have all these factors and to practice to manage the articulation. There's lots and lots of different things when we work with podcast hosts, or we work with authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks, there are a lot of mechanics that we go through for phrasing, and asking certain questions, and speeding up, and slowing down, and different listening techniques. All of that is wonderful and valuable. But if I gave you nothing else today, it would be to talk with you about who you are being when you are being a leader, and it coming through your voice that way. So this is all about your inside voice.
It's who you are, and who you are being far more than what you're saying that's going to make the biggest impact on who you're communicating with. We are wired as human beings for empathy. 100%. All the time. We are herd animals, we are social animals, so to speak. And we have these wonderful things called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons allow us to kind of see and understand or feel and understand what somebody else might be feeling. And mirror neurons and empathy kind of cuts both ways. Those mirror neurons that make us able to identify and feel so strongly when we're watching a movie, and the dog dies, or your favorite character falls in love. We feel those feelings even though those events aren't real. That's how powerful those neurons are. And that same biology is what people are reacting to when you're communicating with them, even with non-visual communication. So, for example, have you ever been on the phone, and all of a sudden your stomach drops, because you sense that something has changed without the other person saying anything. Or if you're a parent, your kids are playing in the next room, and suddenly the sound changes, and without even knowing why you find yourself going into check on. And then there's music. Our emotional state can change in an instant, just for those first couple of bars of our favorite songs. So, here's the thing.
You have that same impact on everyone around you. Every single day, we impact those around us whether we're conscious of it or not. And the opportunity for each and every one of us is—Do you want to make a conscious impact or an unconscious impact simply through how you're being? So, have you ever thought to yourself who are you being when you're being the best version of yourself? Who you being when you're being the best version of yourself think about that for a moment. And I'd even invite you now to close your eyes and see where you can feel—see what I said, “See where you can feel?” it's kind of a dichotomy there. But think about it just close your eyes go inside. Where do you feel those emotions in your body when you think about when you feel the best? Think about a scenario about when you have felt the best, maybe a peak experience is, or working with your clients, or, you know, you had a really great experience speaking, or running a meeting, or you had another accomplishment. Where do you feel those emotions in your body? And how would you identify them? A couple of places you can think maybe to check in are your chest, your throat, maybe you have this level of calm alertness. I hear that a lot from clients of level of calm alertness, like you're ready, but your calm. It's a really cool way to be.
You see, we're never taught to practice our emotional states, like we're taught to read, or throw baseball, or create a presentation. But it is a skill, like any other. Intentionally bringing up an emotional state and putting it on—like putting on a new jacket—is something that we as human beings have the absolute ability to do. And it's something that is a very worthwhile practice, because it's not so much like you have to control your emotions, but it's a conscious shifting and a conscious choosing of who we are going to be. And as a leader, this is incredibly important as an internal skill. So, let me break this down into a more practical state.
One of the ways that we train authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks, and our podcast hosts, and our vocal leadership clients to practice these different emotional states, one way we do that is to take a passage from a book—or if we're working with an author to passage from their own book—and read it in different emotional states. You know, and I'm going to give you an example right now. I've got some classic quotes queued up in front of me here. So, this is the first line from The Great Gatsby. So, I'm going to read it normally. And then we're going to try on some different attitudes or different emotional states with it. And you can try this on your own with—open a book and just try doing it in different ways. And the trick is to say, “Okay, as I'm reading it in these different attitudes, how does that feel in my body? Where do I notice it?”so you can bring it up really consciously?
So, here's the first line read straight. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Okay, let's pick a let's pick an emotional state—let's do sad and regretful. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Or if we can try angry. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Right? Maybe we can try excited. So I'm really excited to share, okay. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.”
Okay? So those are some different emotional attitudes. And when you're practicing this, I invite you to practice it in a big way, in an overplayed way, in an over dramatic way, so you can really emphasize. And then every time you do a different emotion and try on a different emotion, close your eyes after you do it and see where you can feel it in your body, see where it raises or lowers your energy. And just start to get a little practice doing this. Because your emotional states are something that you many, many times can choose. And this is also very helpful when you are managing people because as leaders, we tend to be “emotional Velcro”—things stick to us, and we can help it because we're empathic and we care. So, you might start out your day feeling really great, and then help people through a whole series of problems, and then by noon, as you're taking a break, you make time to take a pause and go “Okay, is anything sticking to me that might be somebody else's?” Taking a few deep breaths and blowing it out. So, when you kind of clear yourself, there's some different ways that you can kind of clear yourself throughout the day. And clearing yourself throughout the day is super important because of this “emotional Velcro” state that we go into. And because we can shift emotional states, as quickly as we want to. We tend to be—if particularly if you're a coach, if you're speaker, if you are a conscious leader, and you're out there working with people, you've probably been on a ride with people through this empathic state that you have every day. And so, it's important in between times, to take care of your vocal leadership. To pause and see what your internal voice is telling you—has something anybody said to you kicked up an old belief maybe of something that, you know, kind of mirrored off of a client or a colleague, that you need to take a moment to shift? Or maybe someone had something really dreadful happened to them, and even though you didn't totally take it on, there's a little bit of something you need to process.
There's a couple of different vocal techniques you can do to release some of that stress physically, that then translates again to your nervous system and help you bring back that balance or that homeostasis, that internal / external voice congruency that we're looking for. And one of those is something that I mentioned a little while ago, which is throat massage. The throat is a very vulnerable area for most of us. It's not something we allow people to have access to, you know, you touch people on the shoulder, you touch people on the arm, you might even touch people on the knee, give them a hug, but somebody touches your throat? This is a very vulnerable space. So, giving yourself a few minutes to give yourself a little bit of a rub, or slide your fingers particularly up in this area on the bottom of the jaw. Thumb presses—thumb presses down the side. There's a massive muscle that goes from the bottom of your ear all the way down to the throat called the Sternocleidomastoid—say that five times fast. That's a big muscle that also is related to TMJ. So, if you have any jaw issues, sometimes massaging and giving some attention to that big muscle will be a relief for you. So that's one thing you can do to relieve some stress in that area. The second one, I also alluded to, and that is blowing it out. But I also like to refer to it in honor of my grandmother as “The Italian Grandmother Sigh.” And so, this is again, something that helps activate the relaxation part of our nervous system, and it's simply taking some large deep breaths and allowing a sound to come out on the end. So just “Aaaaaaahhhh.”
And I remember my great grandmother sitting in crocheting in the afternoon, and every so often, she would just let out this deep sigh. And I realized years later that that was her way of just releasing tension. She wasn't trying to get attention, she wasn't being dramatic, anything like that it was her body just even unconsciously, just releasing some of the tension that she was going through. So that's another very simple, very, very easy technique that I would recommend.
So, in particular, before you go into meetings, check in with yourself and see what you might need. It's very, very easy for us to get caught up in the doing. But it's the being that allows us to stay on track and go with the flow and be the biggest help of those other people that we interact with and that we lead.
One of the questions I get asked by leaders a lot, is “How much should I share personally with my team, how open or vulnerable is good to be?” Now this question came up long before we were dealing with the global situation we're dealing with now.
So, let's go back to our example of being in an online meeting or a conference call. And so, let's say you've been conscious of your way of being and you're bringing a good version of yourself to your phone call. You are ready to listen to people, your empathy is turned on high, you feel good, you’re breathing, your tempo and articulation are natural and flowing for you, and you're kind of embodying this calm in the storm for your team.
Now as you start your meeting, what many leaders are reluctant to do, but is extremely important to do particularly in times of uncertainty and difficulty is—it's important to acknowledge any elephants in the room. These concerns or issues that your team might be dealing with, but maybe they're reluctant to bring up. So, you as a leader holding a space for what we call clearing is going to help your team be fully present and deal with the task at hand and focused. So, regardless of the way you have this clearing—and there are several ways to approach clearing, I think there are going to be a little outside what we have time for today. But the point is that your role is to model what we would refer to in storytelling as telling the story from the scar, not the wound. Telling the story from the scar, not the wound. So, here's how that looks or sounds. This is where you acknowledge what you may be feeling or going through that's impacting you. But keeping in the clear state of being that you're holding from the team.
So, for example, you might share at a time like this “No, overall, we're doing pretty well, I have to admit, something that's on my mind is my elderly parents live far away, and my mom has some issues with her lungs. So, I have to admit this is causing some stress. And I'm grateful to be able to be in contact with them. And I know they're taken care of, but it's something on my mind. So, I'm just saying in this clearing that even though that's on my mind, I'm going to set that aside, so I can be fully present with all of you.”So that's telling the story from the scar.
If you were to tell the story from the wound, and you've probably heard this in meetings, it might sound something like, “I'm really worried about my mom, I don't know what I'm going to do. This whole thing has gotten me so stressed out, and Oh God, guys, I'm so sorry. But I, just you know, I'm having trouble focusing. And I know this is really hard for everybody.” That's what telling the story from the wound sounds like and it creates a totally different energetic scenario in a meeting. It's definitely something that's going to impact your team. They're going to immediately feel that, and then they're going to be reacting doubly, because not only are they then worried for you. They are—instead of an area being compassionate, or empathetic with you, which is you would they would hear and react to the first way—now they're going to be worried. And they're going to have their own worries on top of it. And then they're worried that you're going to freak out and then they have to carry the burden. And then it's going to spiral.
So, telling the story from the scar, not the wound is the primary cardinal rule, I want you to remember, when you're thinking about how to deal with being the leader in conversations that are challenging, times of high stress, high uncertainty. You are there holding the space. And that's why it's important, you know, not to go from meeting to meeting as much as possible but to leave a little bit of space in between even if it's two or three minutes. To regroup, check in on your way of breathing and being and get your nervous system in homeostasis before you walk in, with that your voice intact, with your being intact at the same time. So, modeling this leadership behavior is super powerful for any team to keep people focused, clear, and also feeling connected to each other and to you.
So, I am known in the circles that know me as a bit of a fire hose on this topic and whatnot and give a lot of information and a lot of topics. And I do just want to remind you that a bunch of this, and these tips are written down in the Vocal Leadership Workout I mentioned at TwinFlamesStudios.com/vid19.
I want to pause for a minute before I lay on any more, and just see about questions, and opening up the floor for comments, and things like that. So, let's take a look here. Oh, this is very cool. We got Canada, Melbourne, Australia. Oh, good to know Australians very commonly use up talk. I yeah, I have my I have several Australian colleagues and I haven't heard of them. So, I have been curious about that.
It's pretty, pretty common in the media in particular. So, when you're watching the news—
Really?—
We talk, and we talk, and we talk, and when we go up at the end, and everything's great.
Very common in Canada as well, as well as the Midwest of the US. But really, it's a human thing. Yeah, it's very much a human thing. So, I'm very curious in all of the info I just threw at you guys, any kind of questions you might have, or if you'd like me to go deeper or clarify on any particular topics. And while you guys are typing, I'm going to go ahead and put that link into the chat.
If you've got any tips, or if I can check out your website, because I find it takes me a while to get my voice warmed up in the morning.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And is there things on there that I can—even now like I'm talking to you, I'm like “I could do with some more cup of another cup of tea or some honey or—“
Definitely. Yeah, those are those are all good things. Yeah, there's a bunch of things in there.
One of the things we can definitely use gargling with warm salt water is really great for breaking up mucus, particularly, excuse me in the morning. Another thing we always tell folks, if you're going to be doing a lot of speaking, of course, stay away from dairy, citrus, and if you can stand it coffee—I usually ignore that last one. And so those all are things that tighten the voice. Yeah, any kind of really heavy meals. Anything that's going to kick up your stomach acid—if you tend to be sensitive and all of that—may impact the quality of your voice or the stamina of your voice. If you have stomach acid coming up, it's going to erode your—it's going to make things more tired.
Sleep is another big one. You can usually tell if somebody's tired by the quality of their voice. Their energy is going to be a little off, they're going to be a little slower, they may start to “uhm” and “ahh” again. So, sleep as much as possible is really a good thing to take note of. And that throat massage I mentioned before, is important.
I'm a big fan, I drink a lot of tea. So, I'm usually get some sort of tea, yeah, ginger, tea, anything herbal tends to be good for the voice to kind of keep things going. Some people have some issues—and sometimes it's just the day—with mouth smacking noises or that kind of mouth click sounds, which is super annoying. And so, if you know that you are somebody who has a tendency to do that, a trick from the voice acting world is to have a bite of an apple, or particularly a green apple. And there's something about the pectin and the acid in the apple that helps to alleviate that mouth smacking noises. Many times, if you go into a professional recording studio, you'll see a bowl of apples on a table. And most people don't know why that is. But it helps to alleviate that. Chapstick is also helpful to have for that. But sometimes water doesn't do it. It's another thing you got going on. That also does point to dehydration though. If you get a lot of mouth smacking noises, chances are you have some dehydration. Speaking of which…
I think it's such a fascinating area, like you said, your comment around, we've got something quite thin holding up a whole bowling ball. And I never thought about it like that. But if anyone's got any questions really encourage you to put them in the chat. Tina, I think I've become more aware of my voice, the more I speak. And particularly having sat on this conference now for what eight days I can feel my throat—
That’s a big job—
Getting a more of a workout than it would normally do. So, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I've already opened your link that you popped in the chat. So, I'll be downloading some of the cool leadership stuff too. So yeah, it's, it does make a difference. And even just listening to you reading that same sentence with different emotions is actually… Yeah, actually, what do I want to come out?
What do you want? What do you want to come out?
Yeah. So, we're working with authors who want to narrate their own books, we'll practice with them, like “What's the way of being that they want to come across as?” And they're kind of amazed when they listen back to themselves, how their voices, how it lands with the listener. Yeah, and sometimes it's not what you expect, sometimes, a more gentle approach is not the best thing. Really just depends on what you're looking to convey. Sometimes a much… You can go way bigger than you thought you could. And that's good news for people like me with, you've always been trying to like not, you know, overwhelm people with our big personalities and all that.
When you're working with audio, or you're working with a medium when you're not in person, many times you can go bigger than you can when you are adding that physical element to it. Not on a stage—stage, you can go really big as you get a big room and all of that. But, you know, if you, I'm sure you've been in networking events where somebody is just like, “Hi!!!”, you know? And they're just really big, and in your face, and all of that. It's “ahh!” you know, personal space. But online, we have a lot more room for people to get in our face, because they're not really there. There's a bit of separation, kind of an energetic level, and also, in our personal space. We don't have any kind of automatic—necessarily—any automatic reactions to someone coming that close to us physically. And again, that's very cultural. Some cultures have very, very close physical space, some it's way further out. So, the online formats do make it more flexible in that particular sense.
But we're finding a lot of teams—and particularly in corporate—are even doing just audio. And there's a lot of advantages to doing just audio meetings. One is it changes the way that you listen. You don't get triggered by people's facial expressions, you really just have to listen to what they're saying and how they're being. The second thing is, is you're not worried about, like, you and I are on camera right now, and you know, we're a little bit crow-like. Sometimes we're like, you know, checking our stuff. You know, am I in the right position? How’s my chin, you know? All of that kind of stuff. So, it helps to relax the people in the meeting. I was just coaching someone who runs a PR firm for executives on running online meetings, and taking their live meetings on to Zoom and audio format. And one of the things that we talked about extensively was, video / no video, and we decided on no video, and she got a lot of feedback afterwards about how comfortable that made it for people to not have to worry about their background, or if they've done their hair, or if their kids were around or you know, especially in the circumstances we're in right now. And that really allowed them to just be present with the content. And they were, you know, she was interviewing Fortune 100 CEO, you know, and normally you do want to like, look your best and all of that to be in something like that. And they could just like, you know, be in their jammies if they really wanted to, and still have this professional conversation.
So, I really think that audio-only formats for online meetings is highly underrated. I work with the majority of my clients—and always have coaching clients, consulting clients, podcasting, audiobooks, vocal leadership—primarily via audio only, so that you learn and you actually train that listening, because there's so much that you can pick up. And it gets quite fascinating once you practice it for a while and you're not relying on the visual cues anymore, what you can hear, and then start to trust your intuition and ask questions of people—
Yeah—
To get that.
I've been wearing my air pods for every session for the same reason because it blocks out all of the atmospheric noise. We have some pretty chatty parrots in our yard, and cats like to meow, and all of that sort of thing that we don't have in an office either.
So, Tina, thank you so much, sending so much love, and thanks from Melbourne. If you're ever in Australia, please let me know. And next time I'm in the States—
Tina Dietz
I will pick you up on that.
Perfect. Thank you so much—
Thank you so much, Julia. Thanks everyone.
Thank you.
Interested in learning more about how you can strength
Tina talks with Meaghan Lamm about how we can feel our feelings, get curious about our thoughts, and shamelessly self-promote.
In this episode:
The number one block preventing people from shamelessly promoting themselves
Tina’s top tips on how to use your fear to propel you instead of hold you back
Mindset techniques to shamelessly self-promote yourself and your business
—
Listen to the podcast here:
The Secret To Shameless Self-Promotion with Tina Dietz
I’m super excited to have you here. I’ve wanted to have you on the podcast for many months and I’m excited to talk about shameless self-promotion. I think this is the topic that a lot of women in particular struggle with or even self-promotion in general.
Before we dive into that, tell us who you are and what you do on the internet.
I own a company called Twin Flames Studios, and after many years of building businesses internationally in more than 20 different industries, I now specialize in the world of audio to help people get their messages out into the world. We produce and develop podcasts. We work with thought leaders and subject matter experts to get their audio books produced and out into the world, as well. On a personal level, I work with folks on vocal leadership, which is a whole other body of work.
Your team produced about the first two-dozen episodes of this podcast. I don’t think this podcast would exist without you. If I hadn’t hired you for the added accountability, I don’t know that this podcast would have happened.I remember in the very beginning, you sent me some really great exercises and articles to improve my vocal leadership. There were so many things I learned, like how the inflection in your voice can convey a certain emotion, whether you’re intending to do it that way or not, which I found fascinating.
Yes, we had that whole conversation about uptalk where we subconsciously raise the inflection of our voice at the end of our sentences like it’s a question when we mean to make it a statement. And then that makes us sound like we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.
It also points out things within yourself that you didn’t realize were there because it’s a very subconscious thing. You’re not consciously ending all of your statements as a question because you lack confidence in that area. It’s very subconscious. Once I realized I was doing it, it was interesting to note which moments it popped up in my speech. Then I started to work on that with my mindset coach.
That’s perfect.
When you’re working with your vocal leadership clients and you get into the issue of shameless self-promotion, what would you say is the number one block that people have when it comes to promoting themselves shamelessly?
I would say the number one thing is that people don’t want to piss anyone off with what they’re saying. They don’t want to upset anyone. Not a single one of us enjoys looking stupid or being embarrassed. That’s the shame part and that’s why Brené Brown says shame is a master emotion. Shame is really what’s underneath. I don’t want people to be mad at me. I don’t want to upset anyone. I don’t want to rock the boat. I don’t want to look bad. I don’t want to be embarrassed. All of those and more. It really comes down to that being the core of what stops us from stepping out and speaking our truth.
Absolutely. To get to the point of starting this podcast, it was a big vulnerability moment for me. I had to put myself out there, knowing how feminists and women with strong opinions are often treated on the internet. Creating this podcast and putting it out into the world, with my opinions, was a big vulnerability moment for me.
I haven’t run into many haters yet, but there was a lot of mental work that went into gearing up for this shameless self-promotion, as we’re calling it, because I knew that even though as many supporters as I have, there is also a flip side to that. The people who troll you, especially in today’s political climate, where it gets nasty on the internet.
What are your top tips on sitting with that vulnerability and fear, the fear of looking stupid or like you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about? What are your tips on sitting with those emotions and letting them propel you rather than stop you?
Most of us have a tendency to delay the intensity of what we feel. We’re trained to control our emotions and put a clamp on them. What we’re not trained to do is to allow ourselves to have the capacity to be with strong emotions and let them move through us. That is a learned practice.
It is an emotional, psychological, energetic practice of allowing yourself to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling. When you’re first starting to do this, you’re going to notice all the thoughts attached to it. The questions, decisions, and things that you say about yourself and the world. And it’s not pretty. You have to learn to become an observer of your own thought and not dissociate yourself.
Start to gain some objectivity where you observe the feelings or thoughts that you’re having like a movie. If you can identify it, you can start to move things in different directions. If you feel like you’re at a point where you just can’t move past it or something that is unsayable or unendurable, start to identify the component parts of that feeling. Identify the physical sensation, the things that you say to yourself, the things that you say about the world, and so on. Break that down into its component parts and you start to be able to make choices. And choices give you power.
‘Choices’ was my word of the year for 2020. This year, I had to make a lot of choices and to feel my feelings rather than numb them out so that I could get to a place where I could do things while feeling fear. Fear is typically at the core of everything we’re avoiding doing. If you sit with it long enough, you’re going to realize there’s an underlying fear for not wanting to do whatever you’re avoiding.
So you have to sit with it. It doesn’t go away. It is a conditioned, biological response to keep you safe. Fear used to keep you safe from saber-toothed tigers, and now it keeps you safe from stress or bad chicken.
And trolls on the internet.
And trolls on the internet. The fear doesn’t go away. You just learn how to acknowledge the fear and do the scary thing anyway. I think that’s the place that you have to get to for authentic, shameless self-promotion. To authentically and shamelessly do what you have decided is your mission here on this earth in this lifetime, you have to get to a point where you’re not numbing out the emotions that are uncomfortable.
You’re feeling them and you’re acknowledging them. You’re not telling yourself you’re wrong for feeling them because you’re a human being and you experience the whole range of human emotions. Then, you go out and do the thing anyway.
When I first started my journey through mindset work in 2016, I had never heard the phrase before. No one asked me, how does that make you feel? How does this frustrating situation make you feel? My family did not talk about uncomfortable things. If we had uncomfortable things going on, we handled it very poorly on our own and when we came back together, we pretended like nothing happened.
As a result, I can’t say I grew up to be a super well-adjusted human being who is able to freely express her emotions. But working through that has most definitely been a journey for me, because I had to learn, often painfully, how to stop numbing my feelings by overworking. It’s really common in hustle culture to numb oneself by scrolling on social media or binging on Netflix.
Instead of asking you if you’re still watching, Netflix should have an emotional setting that asks if you are numbing your feelings or actually watching something.
Yes, exactly! I had such a difficult time recognizing when I was feeling anything, because I had numbed it for so long that I just had to name the physical sensations that were happening in my body.
That was how I found out that being mad makes my fingers tingle. It was so fascinating to me to learn how to do that. For a long time, I felt really dumb because I was 30 and I didn’t know what my feelings felt like. I think that happens to a lot of people and I’m hoping that this episode really normalizes that because a lot of us are not taught how to process our emotions. Human beings are designed not to be uncomfortable.
Absolutely. When I’m working with executives and we’re talking about vocal leadership and communication, we talk about how your internal landscape changes your external landscape. If your physical voice is the instrument that you’re playing, like an oboe or violin, then your internal conversation, beliefs, feelings and the things that you say are the music that you’re playing. You’ve written that music. In order to become a virtuoso and be able to play the music that you want to play with your voice and your message, you have to look at the music that you’re playing.
Where are you missing a verse or skipping over things? Where is the tempo off? The voice is such a great indicator of our internal music where we might have a stanza or two that are not in sync with the rest of the composition. One of the quick exercises we can do around embodiment is to bring up all of the physical sensations of what it feels like to be the best version of yourself. We can use this to train our bodies to actually feel better when we are experiencing things that we don’t love feeling. We can do it on the other side as well and train ourselves to feel the way we want to feel because neurologically, the brain doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. It’s a programming issue.
Brains are fascinating. This is why people get sucked into cults.
Absolutely. Politics, as well. If you bring up a peak experience, where you felt like a great version of yourself and allow yourself to go into that memory, you can change your body chemistry. Bring up that experience in your body, as if it’s happening in the moment. Scan your body, scan your thoughts, scan your feelings, and you can change your body chemistry in under two minutes.
You can practice feeling better and like the best version of yourself. We spend a lot of time analyzing what we consider negative emotions. We spend time processing when you’re angry or sad or feeling hopeless, but it works on the opposite side of things, too. A lot of times, we leave the other emotions out of the equation, because happiness feels like something that happens to us and not something that comes from us. Confidence is another one. No one’s ever told us you can feel confident because you choose to feel confident.
It’s true. I have people tell me all the time that I’m so confident and that they are intimidated by me. I’m always looking over my shoulder wondering who they’re talking to because those aren’t the thoughts that are on a loop in my brain. When other people can mirror back what I’m actually projecting out into the world, which isn’t necessarily a facade, is really interesting. I’m not thinking of myself that way, but that’s certainly how I’m coming across because that’s how I’m acting. Which is a weird dichotomy when you think about it.
I think that has come from doing the work and feeling the feelings and identifying what’s going on and being able to work through it without making myself feel bad. When you try to numb the negative feelings, you also numb the positive feeling.
Yeah, the whole thing gets deadened.
It all comes from the same place so you can’t numb one without numbing the other. You have to allow yourself to experience the entire range of human emotion in order to experience authenticity and just as a human being in general.
Have you seen the movie Finding Nemo?
Yes, I’m pretty sure I just watched it a couple weeks ago.
That’s hysterical. I love that movie. One of my favorite parts is the sharks that are trying to not kill other fish. They have this whole kind of 12-step group and their motto is ‘fish are friends, not food’. I’ve changed that to ‘feelings are friends, not foes’. Think about how you can be friendly and have room for all of your emotions.
One of my favorite books is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. She talks about fear being ever present in a creative life. What is important is how you deal with that fear. It’s how you make space for it and that is a really powerful concept. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and will and that’s unnecessary to kind of squish that into a box. You can leave room for fear in the backseat of your car, like she talks about. Fear does not get to touch the radio, fear does not get to choose where you’re going. It doesn’t get to have an opinion on where you stop for snacks, but there’s room for it in the backseat.
I love that analogy. I imagine shoving my fear into the backseat and telling it to sit down and shut up. I call my fear Karen, who lives inside my brain and is very negative. I get to the point where I say Karen, thank you for your opinion, you can sit down now. I can picture her stomping away in her high heels with her Karen haircut and sitting down in the back of the room.
This is very effective for me. I think this conversation is so relevant to feminism and feminism ideas of toppling the patriarchy. This is for men, women, and non-gender conforming people. Men are embroiled in toxic masculinity, where feeling any other emotion besides anger is seen as a weakness. Women are constantly told that they’re too emotional. Opposite ends of the spectrum: women have too many emotions and men don’t have enough. We can get to a place where every emotion is valid and it’s safe to experience and express every emotion.
Not just safe within yourself, but safe to have emotions externally around other human beings. When we can get to a point where we don’t need toxic masculinity anymore, because it doesn’t matter if a man cries, he can feel more feelings than anger. He can express more feelings than anger without somebody calling his masculinity into question.
It is a tool to break out of this patriarchal society if we can get to a place where women aren’t trying to appear less emotional and men are not embroiled in anger as the only good emotion to have.
We’re all highly emotional beings. It’s a matter of expression and what we feel safe expressing in a situation. This ties into this idea of shameless self-promotion because we’re always in self-promotion. We’re always promoting something. It could be something that you have an opinion about. As a human being walking around, can you state your opinion, and be okay with that? Can you have a conflict at work and work through that in a way that feels both productive and stimulating?
It does bring up strong emotions, but you work through it together rather than shutting it down. One of the biggest access points for mustering that kind of mastery of emotions is curiosity. Curiosity is my favorite state of being because curiosity is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. If you’re upset, you might not be able to feel good but you might be able to access curiosity. I wonder how I can just feel a little bit better right now. It snowballs its way out of something. It’s not an all at once process and it is a never ending process.
You get through one plateau and you think that x is your problem. So you work your way through x and you grow from that work. Then you move along and find another problem that you have to work through. This is especially true in business where you think that your next goal is to make $5,000 a month and when you get there, there’s a whole new set of mindset work to be done. And so on and so forth.
You’re not fixing your issues. You don’t fix them one time and then never have them again. As you evolve and grow, whatever your goals are, whether it’s money or relationships or whatever, there’s always going to be something else that you’re running into. Your brain is constantly trying to keep you safe from what it perceives as dangerous threats and your brain thinks that anything that it doesn’t know the outcome of is a dangerous threat. If your brain can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen, it thinks you’re in danger. It’s going to try to get you not to do that and the most effective way to get you not to do that is to make you afraid.
No matter what you’re doing, no matter where you’re going, you have to remember, you’re always going to be afraid and you just have to remind your brain that it’s okay to be afraid, but you’re going to do it anyway. Putting yourself out there is probably not going to kill you.
No, absolutely not. You mentioned your inner Karen before. When we’re dealing with fear, one of the visuals that I like to use is a puppy or a kitten because our fear isn’t evolved. Our fear isn’t us. If you imagine that your fear is a puppy or a kitten that is scared and needs to be taken care of, if that appeals to you more, then you can bring up the self-compassion to take care of that.
Assert yourself as the adult taking care of that piece of yourself rather than it being an overwhelming, all-consuming thing or becoming enraged at yourself, which God knows I’ve done many times in the past. Asking myself why do I feel this way? Why do I suck? I love the idea of being able to just sit with those emotions.
As a side note on the business side of things, when we’re talking about self-promotion, it’s a big hurdle for a lot of people. Particularly artists and people who are more on the ‘woowoo’ side of things, which I would classify myself on that side of things. For an analogy, if you offer someone a homemade cookie and whether they accept your cookie or not, it has nothing to do with your cookies. A person may say no because they don’t want a cookie, or they don’t like chocolate, or maybe they’re diabetic. They have their own reasons for saying no and nothing is wrong with your cookie. The same is true for them saying yes. There’s nothing wrong with you when somebody says yes or no to what you’re putting out into the world.
That is a big hurdle for anybody to get over when they’re first starting a business or even as their business grows. Especially when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re in business for yourself. Many businesses are a personal brand using the owner’s name. You’re not selling a product, you are selling yourself.
I have a friend who owns a bookstore and when people don’t buy a book, she gets annoyed. She gets annoyed when they come in and wander around the shop, admire her store, but don’t buy anything. But she doesn’t take that personally, because she’s selling a product. She’s selling books.
When you’re selling your service, your knowledge, your expertise, your strategy, you’re selling yourself on a very personal level. It can be difficult to remember that you’re not really selling yourself, but that you’re selling them an outcome. Those two things do not have to be related. If someone says no, it’s because they weren’t interested in what you had to buy, just like they weren’t interested in your cookie, and that leaves more for the people who are interested.
I think that’s a fantastic way of looking at it. It’s never about us. It’s always about the other person and what they’re experiencing. If we make it about ourselves, we’re not going to sell anything. Coming from personal services, it all has to be about what the outcome is. We’re all self-centered. Human beings are wired to be self-centered. When you’re talking with other people or you are marketing on social media, being curious and interested in what other people are up to is always going to be the pathway to building your business. Particularly in personal services, because relationships are at the heart of every single thing.
Long story short, you can fix the entire world by feeling your feelings and changing your thoughts. Your ego just solved it all. This conversation didn’t go how I was anticipating it to go honestly, but I loved where we ended up because we kind of dived more into authenticity.
In order for you to be the most authentic version of yourself, you have to acknowledge that you are a whole person with the entire range of human emotion inside of you. It is okay and normal and good for you to feel all of your feelings. To acknowledge them. Sometimes I am in a shitty mood for no reason and that is okay.
It’s okay to be pissed off for no reason and take the day to not do anything or not communicate with people because you keep snapping at them. That’s normal. I think that in order for you to get to a point of shameless self-promotion, you first have to explore shameless authenticity. Once you do that, you get to a place where you’re feeling your feelings, because you acknowledge that you’re a human being with human emotions and feeling your feelings can help you topple the patriarchy.
I think that sounds like a perfect place to close, don’t you?
I absolutely do. Feel your feelings, change your thoughts, topple the patriarchy.
Listen to this one over and over again. I’m sure I will be listening to it multiple times because these lessons are so important. These are tools to go in your toolbox that you can use over and over again. When you get curious, don’t be afraid of feeling your feelings. Don’t be afraid of your thoughts or changing your thoughts. Together we’ll all feel our way through toppling the patriarchy and everything will be great.
Thanks for listening to the Feminist Visionaries podcast!
Tune in to episode 111 of The Creative Impostor podcast, hosted by Andrea Klunder. We will show you how to amplify your message(Podcast on The Creative Impostor, August 9, 2020)
Episode 111. “In this phase of growth, it feels weird. It feels nebulous. It feels like this molting bird… Sometimes it takes as long as it takes, you know, it's not the enlightenment Olympics.” ~Tina Dietz
This episode is for the birds. Or rather, about birds. More accurately, how much creative humans have in common with molting parrots.
Hang with me; this episode isn't wall-to-wall ornithology talk. I recorded my conversation with Vocal Leadership Expert and Podcast Host Tina Dietz way back in the before-times. Still, her message about self-acceptance and faith in our creative evolution rings doubly true at a time when putting our trust in anything is a struggle.
She just happens to equate this transition with shedding feathers.
As founder and CEO of Twin Flames Studios, Tina molds (not molts) experts into influencers, teaching clients how to amplify their message. Whether it's through their own podcasts, as guests of other shows, or as in-demand speakers, Tina's vocal leadership expertise goes beyond the simple correction of speech mechanics.
Transitions rarely come without challenges. There's the macro level, global shifts taking place right now, and then there are the awkward personal doubts and missteps.
You're not wrong for feeling vulnerable. Massive life changes force us to question our personal and professional identities.
On this 101st episode, we have Tina Dietz. Tina grew up mostly in western New York State, and studied in Buffalo, New York during her undergrad years. She had a childhood passion for musical theatre, and helped her parents out extensively in their family business. She went to graduate school in North Carolina, focusing on education, and returned to Western New York, where she worked with an international leadership organization called Camp Rising Sun. She also worked as a life coach and educator, focusing on adolescence. After several years, she, her husband and two children migrated to Costa Rica. She has now relocated to Florida and morphed her coaching and business development company into an audio production studio called Twin Flames Studios, where she produces audiobooks and podcasts for clients. Tina, thank you so much for being on our show.
Aseem—I really appreciate it.
It's great to have you! You've had a tremendous amount of expertise in podcasting, and in developing podcasters, and so it's really great to have your perspective on the show and to hear about your journey.
In prepping for this interview, I was listening to some interviews that you've done in the past, and I was particularly intrigued with one that talked about how you were handed a tape recorder at the age of two.
Yeah, I have that recording!
I would love to hear that story and have you shared that with the audience, please.
Well, I'm originally from the Buffalo New York area. And by way of context, my father is—and was—a very fiery Italian man. And before he turned his sights to entrepreneurialism—and I grew up inside of my parents’ business—prior to that, he worked for the Asbestos Workers Union. And he ended up having to do quite a bit of travel. We ended up living out in San Diego when I was really, really little—around two years old. And the Easter that we were out there the first time, my parents’ friends came—I was the only child there—and they handed me a tape recorder and started to show me how to use it. I actually still have the recording. (I have to put this on digital at some point.) And you can hear me—and them saying “Okay, here you press play, and hear you press stop,” and I'm like, “I got it. I got it.”
Like immediately, you know, and then the first thing I do is you hear these little footsteps and you hear my voice go, “Hi, I’m Tina. What's your name? And “Do you like Easter? Okay, thanks. Bye.” And then go on to the next person and basically interviewed everyone in the room on their opinion on Easter. Wow. And I love the laser-like focus on understanding everyone's viewpoint on Easter.
Viewpoint on Easter was very important to my two year old self apparently.
Did they ask you the question? Did you have a chance to answer?
No, I did not answer my question on Easter, but there is a funny bit on there where my dad's trying to show me something else, and I wouldn't let him show me. “No, I got it,” and I have to say that characterized a lot of our relationship when I was growing up, for better or for worse.
But yeah, I always had a tape recorder. I remember recording on my floor when I was a kid, trying to improve on nursery rhymes with my own versions, and then later on when I was about ten years old, I discovered my parents’—we had a lot of albums; my parents love music—my dad's George Carlin, AM/FM album, which is a classic comedy album, not for ten-year-olds.
Most George Carlin content is not for ten-year-olds!
No, generally not for ten-year-olds, but I loved it! And did what I usually did, which is memorize it. My parents were pretty hippie-ish. We had a lot of parties at our house and things like that, and I came out at one of the parties one day and basically did George Carlin's routine,much to their delight. Then I started recording radio shows with my friends, as boomboxes came out and things like that.So it's been in my blood, but it took until I was 40 to come back to it. I had done a lot of vocal work, voice acting work, things like that. But it was my mom for my 40th birthday who sent me a collection of recordings that she had taken off of tape, she even took some 8mm camera stuff—old, old movie stuff—and made kind of a DVD of my life. And I heard this recording of me at two years old.
A sizzle reel. I love it!
It was like a two year old sizzle reel! I needed to be on Dance Moms or something like that. Yeah! But it was that—it hit me in the face, because I had been told a lot by a lot of people, “You should start a podcast, you should start a podcast, you should start a podcast.” And I'd been holding off and holding off. And hearing my voice at two years old was my wake up call to go ahead and do it. It's like, “You've been doing it anyway. Just do it,” and that was the rabbit hole I fell into with podcasting.
Yeah, I love that. Well, thank goodness your friends were encouraging you so that you had that backdrop. And when you heard your voice, it was like, that was a catalyst, that was a push off.
I had so much support. It was wonderful.
That's really extraordinary. I love how that's full circle, how a passion from childhood is now helping you achieve self actualization in many ways, because you're a natural.
Very much so. I talk with my clients all the time and ask them to kind of go back into what they loved as children. And sometimes you have to reach really far back to find that kind of wonder, find that joy. You know, one of my friends was talking about, she had to go back to 18 months old to really find the purity of it. She had a very difficult time. But bringing that forward into her life now has been so enriching.
Yeah, I'm sure. And I'm not a geneticist, Tina, but I'm pretty sure the fiery aspect of being Italian is inherited.
I would agree.
So your dad should have known what to expect.
Yes, exactly.
Do you have siblings?
No, I'm an only child. My younger sibling was my parents’ business. They started it when I was about three.
I love the way you described that. That's really good. So you're out in San Diego, tell us about the business they started.
Well, they came back from San Diego, we made our way back across the country and we landed in the southern tier of Western New York—a rural area called Holland, New York. My parents built a house, and my dad was still working, but they got—not a fireplace— more like a boiler or furnace for this big house that they were building. My uncles are contractors. My grandfather's built stuff. So it was a family project.Well, the directions on the installation—something happened and almost burned the damn house down. So my mom got on the phone with the company and ended up having like a three hour conversation with them, and at the end of it, they said, “You know what, have you ever thought about selling wood stoves? We're really interested in having you start a dealership in your area.” My mom was like, “What?”Now my mom had never considered being an entrepreneur, and she was staying home with me at the time. I found out many years later, she talked about this office job she had had when she was 18, 19 years old as a punch card operator. Those of you out there, you know what that is? Early computers, you had to punch in everything on these cards? I couldn't believe it when I found out my mom, of all people—my mom had worked for IBM. I thought she was just staying home with me. But my dad had been looking for an excuse really, to get out of the manual labor side of what he was doing, and so they decided to give this wood burning stove shop idea a try.We had space in the first floor. So the first floor became the business. And we lived upstairs and so I started answering the phone and going to trade shows when I was around six.
Amazing! Well, naturally. You're so good with your voice and in talking to people. So were you asking them about their thoughts on Easter? Or just furnaces?
No, I didn't ask them on their thoughts on Easter for sure. Interestingly, at least I think it is, I kind of hated the business. I had a love hate relationship with it.
You had some resentment?
Yeah, it took up a ton of my parents time and it was ever-present. Our employees were upstairs in our home all the time. Which was fine and well, but I was alone a lot.Well, how did you feel that time when you were alone? Did you read a lot? Did you watch movies? What were your passions?Tons of reading. I was a big, big reader. Listening to music. I did a lot of living room performance, tremendous amount of performance. Well, you know, it never occurred to me when I was a kid that anyone else could hear me. It never occurred to me that this business was downstairs, and I was basically entertaining all the customers all the time. And my parents—I'm so glad they never told me.Okay, so there were never requests coming up.
No, no, no requests coming in, or all of that. But there I was, you know, belting out Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis, and Oklahoma and The Sound of Music, and all these musicals that I grew up with, or, you know, music like Supertramp and Styx—I cut my teeth on progressive rock. I'm doing choreography in the living room. And yeah, apparently, it actually was quite helpful, because if customers had to wait to talk to one of my parents during a busy season, they got a show.
Yeah, well, that worked out well. An audience that you weren't even aware of.
Exactly. Sometimes the better option!
Oh, that's really incredible. So did you actually perform in musical theater in high school?
I did. Yeah. I was big into the drama club, and my whole life, I took dance lessons, and I always wanted to do more. Living out in the country was really hard for that. I always wished that I had lived closer to the city, and when I was 16, and my parents gave me wide use of the car, I started going to a theater / art school in downtown Buffalo on the weekends, and I absolutely loved that.
But high school was a really busy time, and driving an hour into the city to do things—it was pretty tedious. So, I basically had to make up a lot of my own opportunities at home and in the tiny community that I was in. My culminating glory was playing Dolly in Hello, Dolly my senior year.
Oh, congrats on that.Yeah, that was a big deal!
And there's some recordings available of it?There are actually recordings. That's true. Weirdly, they didn't record the actual performance. They only recorded the dress rehearsal, which is a shame. But nonetheless, I do have some recordings of various things that I was in over the years from Pirates of Penzance to My Fair Lady and several others.
That's one of the better ones. I love that one. Did you make the sizzle reel?No! She actually didn't put those into that 40-year-old This Is Your Life sizzle reel.
We’ve gotta fix that. Are your parents still with you?
My parents are still with me. And still both up in the western New York area.
Okay, great. So tell us about the decision to go to North Carolina for school.
That was a very strange period of time, and looking back on it, it was kind of insane for me to do that. Because I married pretty young—I was 24—and six weeks later, I was living in North Carolina for graduate school. Completely changed location, had no support system in a new area, and at the time, he didn't have any support system in that area, either. He was able to transfer jobs—he was working in management for Barnes and Noble bookstore at the time. Really young, you know. And I was able to immerse myself in my studies and kind of had a ready-made community. So that was my saving grace, because living in the middle of North Carolina, not a bad place to live, but the climate was not my favorite for sure. Living in the foothills of the Piedmont area was very sticky and very hot, and getting used to living down South in the late 1990s was a huge learning curve.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Yeah. For this Yankee. It was a big learning curve.
So UNC was actually for grad school.
That was for grad school. Yeah, I went to undergrad in the Western New York area.
Okay, gotcha. Is that where you met your husband?
No, actually, we met at Barnes and Noble. It was my first part time job out of high school, in college. I went to school at the University of Buffalo for a year. Coming out of a very small town, while I did very well—I graduated pretty close to the top of my class—but the size and scope, of you know, 50,000 undergrads was a little too much for me.So I ended up taking a gap year, working several jobs at once, which I did a lot throughout the next 10, 15 years or so—working multiple jobs. And Dave was one of the folks that I worked with at Barnes and Noble. We became good friends, and then that turned romantic, and we got married a couple of years later.Fantastic. That's great story. So how long were you in North Carolina? And you ultimately made it to Florida.
Florida came much later, yeah. So the geographic timeline, basically went: We were in North Carolina for two years, and after I graduated from there, we came back to Western New York. And we were there in that area for another 12 years, 13 years. Then we sold everything and moved our young family to Costa Rica for a couple of years.
Yeah, I read about how you split your time between Costa Rica and Florida.Yeah, whenever we can get down there. We've had the pleasure of being in the midst of developing a community, a conscious community, for thought leaders and entrepreneurs and really good folks called Vista Mundo, which is in the mountains of the Central Valley.That's fantastic. I do want to get back to your time post-UNC, but what's fascinating—I read about in terms of Costa Rica—is what's led to a lot of its success. It really is a shining light in Central America as an economic success story. What contributed to it was geography—where there were no real ruling families that could control large swaths of the land, because it's so mountainous.Yeah, there's seven climate zones in Costa Rica. So you can go from beach to cloud forest within several hours. It's a very cool place to be—very cool.Well, we'll definitely chat more about that. I noticed looking at your profile—when you had gone back to Western New York, you were involved in a lot of teaching roles.Yeah, my graduate work—I had worked for a fantastic organization I'm still involved with called Camp Rising Sun, and it is an international leadership camp, summer camp, for teens—boys and girls—from all over the world. And it is a fully scholarshipped camp. The whole idea has been to erase socio-economic barriers, to create connection, and meet humanitarian goals, and this camp has been around since 1930 or so.It's a tremendous organization. That opened my eyes to a larger picture in the world and what young people are capable of. So when I started my career, I really wanted to work with teens and young adults in harnessing that power and that energy of transition and new purpose, and help people get on their path. So that's actually where I started my career, was in the world of education, and nonprofits.That's great. And these were like high school aged kids?High school aged kids and getting into, you know, 18, 19, 20.Yeah, that's really inspiring. I'm beginning to—my daughter is 14 now and my son's 12. And so we're beginning to have those conversations and exploring what they're passionate about and thinking about career trajectories. So it's an exciting time.It is! Mine are that age now. So same thing.Yeah. We do have that amazing conversation. My daughter is petitioning to take a class at her school called Advanced Constitutional Interpretation.That sounds fantastic.And so I was probing her a little bit, because I know she's very big on social justice, and she actually has her own podcast.No kidding!Yeah, she’s very focused on wellness—mental wellness for adolescents. And so she began interviewing her peers on that topic. And she's also been a co-host on another show called Dear Asian Youth. And so I began asking her like, so you know, how do you—what areas specifically are you interested in? She started talking about Japanese internment and citing three Supreme Court cases around that, and I thought, “I'm floored.”I think my daughter and your daughter would have an awful lot in common. It sounds like they operate a lot the same way. My daughter in the wake of George Floyd's murder, she was educating me on resources and presenting me with lists of things we needed to get involved in, and then she's signed yourself up for a 30 day class on how to become a better ally. She's always been an advocate and wanting to get more and more involved. And it's interesting. I don't remember feeling like that when I was 14.Yeah. I tell my daughter all the time, she's definitely smarter than I was.Yeah! It's so great to see.Yeah, that's great. Well, maybe we can make an introduction, have them chat. I think that's a great idea.Your daughter could be a guest on—my daughter's name is Nana—Nana’s show. That could be very intriguing.That would be cool!Thanks for sharing about that organization you’re involved with, youth from around the world. That sounds extraordinary. I also noticed you worked with a college—Villa Maria College and Erie Community College. You're doing some teaching there on—sounds like psychology, a little bit of coaching as well, career coaching?Yeah, career coaching. Erie Community College is one of the largest community colleges in the country. And I was part of an initial team, where we were developing high school-to-college-to-industry partnerships. So we worked with all 200 high schools in the area, and then community connections into the programs in the school.And then I had a really great time working with a couple of the major utility companies—National Fuel and some of the other ones, to help work with their curriculum so that they were getting employees that could actually fill the roles they had available.Wonderful. That's exciting work. You're so well suited to it, and then this kind of mentoring and helping is a theme throughout your career, because you're still you're doing that very much today——Yeah! Creating pathways and fulfilling the more purpose-driven side of things has followed me, you know? It's definitely been a central theme. A lot of the coaching programs I did with the teens—and the nonprofit, I worked with folks to start years ago, called “Tremendous Teens of Western New York,” and our core leadership team program. Everything was about taking a good idea and bringing it into reality, and how do you do that? And so much of that followed me into the work that I do today, and the business-building work that I've done over the last couple of decades.
That's extraordinary. Definitely have found a calling. That's wonderful. So you had your daughter in 2006?Yeah, I had my son in 2004, my daughter in 2006.Okay, so you have a 16 year old son.Yeah, coming up on 16 in a few months, it's really weird to think about, and he's like a foot and a half taller than me. It's insane.Yeah. Well, it's a fascinating time, that's for sure. I'd love to hear about Evergreen Experiment. The premise of it is 10,000 thriving businesses.Yeah!Oh, let me check—this year! By 2020! I know! I have pivoted from that project, not because it was hard. But boy, that was a journey.I was in a process of doing a lot of personal and professional development work. One of the main reasons that I decided to become a therapist was my own healing journey. I had a number of instances of trauma growing up, and found psychology and therapy and then later on, more the personal development side of things. Inspiration—all kinds of things were, you know, fundamental in me: Not staying stuck in a place of victimhood, essentially. So much of what fueled my own exploration and my own learning, was this idea that people could be so wonderful. And such jackasses! Sometimes even simultaneously. And that was a really big part of my own journey to learn how to be—well, in some cases, functional. To spot a vein, and to move into a place of growth. Because if you feel like the world isn't a safe place, you can't build anything that isn't a defense. It can only take you so far.Exactly. Do you talk publicly about the trauma that you endured?To one extent or another. So I've done a lot of work on it. And so my concern is not so much talking about what I went through, it’s that the end listener can stay with me in it without necessarily feeling deeply triggered themselves.Understood. Yeah. And so that's what I try to be sensitive to, because so many people—I think that statistics are something like one in three women have been sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and a lot of us, it's happened to more than once—either from more of a peer situation, or an adult perpetrating either violence or sexual assault or some combination of both. Quite honestly, some of my experiences happened when I was very, very young. And so when you are vulnerable, when you are very young, that vulnerability doesn't tend to go away when you're older, which is why we often see—and I certainly experienced—repeated assault over time, repeated trauma over time.And again, going back to my own exploration, I had to ask myself, why? Why was that happening to me? And what was worse—What was I making that mean about myself? Oh, gosh, yeah.And those beliefs and those thoughts about, “Well, the world must be this way. I must be this way.” Those were the things that really, I had to take a lot of time. Well of course!Over time. And we're like onions, you know, you're going along fine in life, and then you experience something, or you open yourself up to a bigger thing, stepping off into a business, having a child, moving to a new location—all of those things can bring up stuff that I thought was resolved. But now it's a different layer.Yeah, of course, and it's so heartbreaking—the negative psychological impact, not just from the trauma itself, but what you're led to believe about that, and evaluate yourself and the shame, the guilt. All these very unfair sentiments and feelings, and it takes a long time to unravel that.And, I mean, it's a testament to the challenges—it was well over a decade before you were able to really kind of face it, address it. I'm really thankful that you did that, Tina.Thank you.It took a lot of courage on your part to do that. There are plenty of people who don't have that courage. Again, I just feel horrible that you had to experience that. It's obviously because of my gender, it's not something I can ever fully empathize with. I’m just thankful that you had the courage to work through it. And now as you talk about it, you have a lot of strength, and there's a lot of thoughtfulness, your concern for other victims and not triggering them, I think is just very thoughtful and poetic. It speaks volumes of you as a person.Thank you, Aseem, I appreciate that.And I definitely appreciate your candor. We talk about facing adversity on the show and overcoming obstacles, and so this is a clear one, and you've obviously done amazing things in your life. You're an empath yourself, and so, again, kudos on taking the time to address that.So as we reach kind of the end of that decade, tell us about the decision to go to Costa Rica. That sounds like such an exciting change.Oh, yeah. That was a very exciting time. So I kind of came to grips over time with myself that I have a lot of wanderlust, and I love to make home. I'm a Taurus—wherever I am, I have to make my home and find a balance. And at the same time, just wanting to be somewhere new, wanting to try and experience new things.We had decided to sell our house because it had become, honestly, a money pit. It was just not going to get any better, and we said, “You know what, let's get out of this. We want to own our paychecks. We want to have more time freedom to spend, you know, with our kids and on my business” and all of that. So we were already in that process and my husband at the time, Dave, he got a call from his higher-ups. That company was in transition, and they were allowing people to work completely remotely. We had actually created a five-year vision plan, which is something I did with my clients—I still do sometimes. We had this image of five years we were going to be living in Costa Rica, because my family had a lot of familiarity with it. I had run my father's business and we had run retreats down there and things like that.So even though I had never been there, I had a lot of background on the country. And I made a couple of phone calls to some—or not clients, but contacts—I had down in the area. Within an hour and a half, we were hooked up with an apartment, we knew a school system we could send the kids to—I had every piece of information, visa information, anything I needed was just: there it was. It was so much easier to get down to Costa Rica and move in there, than it was to finish selling the house in western New York where we were living!
Amazing! That's extraordinary. And the business you had at that time, this was Twin Flames Studios?No, Twin Flames had started as a progression of StartSomething Creative Business Solutions, which was an iteration originally of Tina Dietz Business Development, which was my original solo coaching practice. So for those out there who are worried about pivoting multiple times, feel free to use me as an avatar, because I've done it many, many, many times. I’ve had many businesses before that. My very first business was around babywearing because my son was super colicky, and I got into babywearing and it was the only thing that calmed him down. Found a tremendous community, and what I got into was teaching classes locally. That was my first business while I was working two other jobs.Brilliant, I love it. So another kind of curve, in this winding path was being a massage therapist for a while?Actually, I wasn't the massage therapist! My dad was. So even though I came out of growing up in a family business, for some reason, I was crazy enough to decide to go back into business with my dad. Now anyone who's ever been involved in a family business is laughing right now.
Oh, yes.Right? So people asked me for years, “Why don't you specialize in coaching family businesses?” Because I'd like to remain sane and unmedicated! Family Business is hard! It's hard. But we actually built a really amazing international training company for massage therapists in teaching advanced techniques. My dad's brilliant with what he does. He invented a modality and didn't even know it. So I ran the business side of that company, and he did all the teaching, and of course, he had all kinds of ideas he wanted to fulfill. But that's really where I learned online business. I taught myself online business and really learned product production and all kinds of marketing and things like that, that I had started learning when I was very young—but it kind of came full circle.Amazing. And you were managing the massage business from Costa Rica?I was done with the massage company, by the time I got down to Costa Rica. The timeline’s a little wonky. But I had stepped off from working with my dad into my full time business coaching practice prior to moving down to Costa Rica. Living in Costa Rica, of course, was a big bump, because a lot of folks are very interested in, “How do you own your paycheck and live this freedom lifestyle, work from home, live on the beach, work from anywhere?” And so I was walking my talk and working with a lot of folks one-on-one who wanted to have that kind of lifestyle and it was—I just worked with some amazing, amazing people.That's fantastic. Well, I think you attract them. You attract people, because you put that energy out there in the world.I do like people, it's true! By and large.Yeah, absolutely. And, and Danny Levin being a good example of that, our mutual friend.Danny's awesome.So how many years, Tina, were you in Costa Rica?Well, we were back and forth to Costa Rica for a while because there's our visa requirements and things like that. So we were down there for three months, came back and lived in Florida for six months, and then we were down in Costa Rica for another year, and then ended up coming back to Florida, and we’ve kind of been here for the last five years now, approximately, going back and forth to Costa Rica on a more casual basis.Unfortunately, we haven't been able to be down there in about the last year or so, but in our community, Vista Mundo, my partners down there have been building homes and the pool and the deck and working with the local community, trying to create more jobs down there, and it's been a really cool project. So I can't wait to get back down there.That sounds really extraordinary. Your kids, were they homeschooled during that time? It would have been elementary school age.Yeah, they have enjoyed—this is what they've told me—that they really enjoyed this period when they went to a private school in Costa Rica, that was bilingual, for a period of time, and then for a year, we did homeschool them. I was really glad that we did because it allowed us to almost kind of take a few habits or beliefs that they had about education out of their system at a young age. So when my kids have now gone back into school, and my daughter's entering high school, and my son is entering his junior year of high school—they're both good students. And they have a perspective on school that I'm very proud of them for having, which is, school is there to serve them. They're not there just to get a grade; school is there to serve them.That's such a great orientation to have. you have to take control. It’s a similar paradigm, “take control over your paycheck,” “take control over education.”Exactly, exactly. How are you going to make the most use of this for yourself? You know, yes, geometry might suck—let's see if we can find some places to actually make this useful in some way, shape, or form. And if it's not going to be useful long term, how can you minimize what a pain in the ass it is now?
Yeah, absolutely! Just a small anecdote—the grading in these math departments—I just don't think it comports with real world experience. The concept is clear that it's understood by the student, but points are being deducted for not having accuracy. And I understand taking a little bit of a hit for that, but the amount that they're deducting, it just doesn't make sense.I’m with you—how to think is so much more important that anything else we can teach.
Y ¿yo sospecho que tú también hablas español?Oh, un poco poca.I'm much better with Spanish when I'm living in the country, being around it all the time. That makes sense, yeah. After a few drinks, I also find that my lingual skills—Oh, wayyyy better! There is a foreign language-to-alcohol ratio we found. We used to hang out with a couple of different families who spoke no English, we spoke no Spanish, and all we had to do was have two drinks—we understood each other perfectly. It’s the weirdest thing!Yeah, alcohol is just phenomenal.I don't know, I think it opened up the quantum field or something. I don't know what's going on there.Synapses firing like we've never seen before. That's really great. Tell us about the Start Something Show, which was very successful as a top 35 podcast for entrepreneurs.Yeah, Inc. Magazine was very, very kind in adding me to that list. I didn't even know about it, until a colleague of mine pointed it out—”Hey, did you see this on inc.com?” Like what? What're you talking about? And that was my first podcast! I just dove in, and it was a very emboldening experience. It was doing something that it felt like I had always done. I hired a company to work with me to do the launch and everything—they're called Cashflow Podcasting. They're still a sister company of my company, we love to collaborate together, we've worked with each other for a really long time. Ben Krueger is the owner there, and he's a fantastic man, wonderful business owner, and so his company took care of everything. I fell in love with the process. I fell in love with podcasting, and I've kind of never looked back on that. It just allowed me to really dive in at this.And at the same time, it gave me a really great excuse to spend more time with audio. I had had this background in voice acting—I had done voice acting on the side. And that's where I had come to the understanding that the audiobook industry was rising. And I started thinking about, “Well, why aren't all my clients and colleagues who are doing bestseller campaigns and self publishing on Amazon—why aren't they doing audiobooks?” So between the podcasting and my inquiry into audiobooks, it led me down a path that I'm very, very grateful I got led down, because that brought me to creating Twin Flames Studios.That's fantastic. And is that where you spend the bulk of your time now with Twin Flames?Yeah, Twin Flames is the business. It's what we decided to double down on and really build. It's the first scalable—really scalable—business I ever created. I'd always prior to that, had been a solopreneur, and I was very dissatisfied with the coaching industry. I still am dissatisfied with the coaching industry.
Just your your fellow coaches and behavior practices or standards or…?It's more the standards and the fact that pretty much anybody can call themselves a coach, and they can really wield tremendous power over other people. And coming from my background as a therapist, I have some concerns about coaching as an industry and it starts to sound like the fitness industry: “You can create a six figure business in 90 days,” you know? Yeah, it can get ugly. But you had accolades and distinction in the coaching field. Forbes had you on their council, the Forbes Coaches Council?Yeah, I was a founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council, and in all transparency—it’s a paid organization. But they sought me out in their first 50 members, their charter members, and it was really great to work with them and be able to be published on that platform. It's definitely a privilege.Yeah. So tell us more about Twin Flames Studios, the services that you're offering. What's your favorite part of that, of the job?So there's kind of three divisions of the company, just to create a little bit of context, but the whole idea for me has been, if I could help more leaders reach more people—if they're out there trying to reach people with positive messages, growth-oriented messages—then I don't have to be the person making all the change in the world. I don't have to be a guru. I don't have to be, you know, some lofty on high, millions of people following me personally, I can help more people reach more people.And books, podcasts, these are some of the lowest hanging fruit that people have worldwide—not just here in North America, but worldwide. That's really what gets me out of bed in the morning, you know? I have this privilege of helping leaders help more people, give people a voice, when they may not have found their own yet, amplify the messages in a positive way, in a good way, get good information out there, all of those things.
So we provide services—done-for-you services—in nonfiction, audiobook production, and distribution, publishing, of course. On the podcasting side of things, we tend to work more with companies, and it's a little more challenging for companies to start a podcast because there's a lot of questions that need to be answered: Who's doing it, why are they doing it, how's it going out there? We're able to help them navigate all of those so that we can humanize these companies, and give them a voice out in the world that people can relate to so that there is better connection.
We have a lot of corporations where it feels cold and impersonal, and we have a lot of stories about the intentions of companies and corporations. If we can get down to a human level of conversations, now we have an opportunity to create a dialogue.Yeah, for sure. I love that.
The third division is actually my favorite division and it's the one that is most in development, because the first two divisions, I have incredible teams, and we're growing and serving a lot of people. But that is also freeing me up to do the deeper work with folks that I really love, which is around vocal leadership.That's really around cultivating your inner voice along with your outer voice, so that you can be more effective as a leader in your communication, in your empathy, in your speaking, and beyond. It actually covers a lot of bases.That's really phenomenal, Tina, and I just love that concept that in order to be outwardly engaging, we have to do some internal housekeeping, and be sure that our internal voice is tracking the way it needs to and kind of mirroring, or in sync with our outside voice. I think that's really phenomenal. It mirrors your concept of walking the walk, so to speak, when you talked about moving to Costa Rica and living that life. It's sort of, you’re showing, and I think your training and your background as a therapist is so well suited for that, to be able to do that.I like to think so! Thank you.That was really phenomenal. Who would you say, Tina, is an ideal client for you?So our clients are subject matter experts and leaders—CEOs and executives. What kind of brings them all together and in common is that they're the type of people that have worked hard, but also with a sense of—I don't wanna use the word integrity—but a sense of truthfulness to themselves. A sense of, they're really doing this for good reasons.Yes.Yeah, forthrightness, right, and really wanting to do good work in the world. And so they're at a certain level of leadership, where now they want to get their voice out, get their message out, to more people, and they want to use a vocal medium, or a voice medium to go ahead and do that—an audio medium.A lot of them are more comfortable speaking than they are writing. A lot of them are really at a point where blogging or social media just isn't cutting it. It's not satisfying, and it's not doing what they want it to do. So they're adding another layer onto that. We work a lot with the financial sectors, we work a lot with legal, as well as business and marketing, and people who do very mission-centered type of coaching work, specialty coaching work. Our coaches tend to be a bit more on the audiobook side of things, and our financial and our executives tend to be a bit more on the podcasting side.
Oh, that makes sense. That's really extraordinary. Sounds like you have a really thriving business that you are really passionate about, and it really allows you to highlight the skills that you've developed over your life and expertise that you've developed. So talking about subject matter experts! Yet again, you're walking the walk, which is really phenomenal.Any other side businesses brewing since you have a mind that never rests?You know that the beautiful thing about having been a business coach for years, even though I don't—I won't say “indulge” in that very often, is that I refer to myself as a “professional instigator” for new ideas, because I can't help myself. It's just the way I'm wired, and I find the most fulfillment now in helping other people fulfill their ideas, and that's incredibly satisfying for me.I'd like to participate in more philanthropic things in addition to Camp Rising Sun, there’s another organization called AllitTakes.org, which is out in California—unbelievable people. They're actually in the process right now of finishing up and releasing publicly to all schools nationwide in the US, an entire socio-emotional learning curriculum, to support not just the students, but also the staff and also the parents through this time that we're dealing with around Coronavirus, and the pandemic, and all the shifts. It is a brilliant curriculum. Folks from Stanford and MIT and the national level of the teachers’ union are all supporting this curriculum, and I'm just so happy to contribute to them any way I can.
That's really phenomenal. Kudos on being involved with that. That's really great.Great people!I'm just mindful of time—we're up to the hour here—and I do have one more question to ask——well I’d ask a question of the audience, and if they got to this far in the interview, listening to you and I talk for an hour—what was it about the conversation that held their interest? Or made them—where do they see themselves in this conversation? Take a moment to actually reflect on that, if you’ve actually gotten this far in the interview.That's really great. And if you'd like to share your response, you can email us from our website, achievepodcast.com, because that would be enticing to hear, and we would certainly respond to you and share that with you, Tina.
I would love that. Thank you.That's really great. This has been a wonderful conversation. My last question for you, Tina, is, do you like Easter?Haha! Yeah.
You're more of a Christmas person?Actually yeah, this is true.Okay! I'm glad we've clarified that now.It's important. It was hanging out there, an unanswered question.It had been a few decades, I thought someone should ask you.Thanks, Aseem. No one has ever asked me that, so…It was just, the universe has brought me here to you for that.Tina, what a great conversation. You know, I really do appreciate how candid you are, your willingness to be vulnerable, and chat about real experiences that you went through and how you overcame them. And I love the mission that you're on. You're in service of others, you're bringing your expertise to help people achieve something wonderful, and I think it's great. I wish you all the success in the world.Thank you. I see him and thank you for doing this series and everything you're up to out in the world. I know you're doing incredible things and helping a lot of people and I'm just honored to be associated with that.That's very kind of you say. Thank you so much, Tina.
Aseem Giri
Aseem has over twenty years of experience as an entrepreneur, private equity investor and investment banker. Aseem now focuses exclusively on Art opportunities, serving as Art Advisor and/or Finance Advisor to Art-related businesses. Aseem has been involved with over twenty companies from a principal investing standpoint. Born in Berlin, Germany and maintains US citizenship.
During these extraordinary times, I invite you to find and embrace the tremendous power of the pause in…your leadership. Take a look
We are living extraordinary times. Times of change where we are all being asked to stop, to observe ourselves with more intention, to act with more kindness. From a distance.
This is a time where we have the opportunity to consider what we have been taking for granted and make some choices.
I invite you to consider making a small shift. A small shift that carries huge change and opportunities with it.
Hey, it's Tina Dietz coming to you live from my office studio here after a long day of having many conversations with leaders from all over the US and Canada.
And what's on everybody's mind?
How are we going to keep doing business as usual when nothing is business as usual?
And here's the opportunity.
We live in extraordinary times.Which gives us the opportunity to be extraordinary leaders.
Now, what does that mean? Does it sound like a lot of pressure?Do you say to yourself “Oh, I'm already a leader, and now I just got to figure this out.”
Well, I would request that right here right now in this moment that you actually just pause.
There is so much power in taking a pause.For your mind.For your spirit.And for whoever you're communicating with.
We live in a world where we are very uncomfortable with silence.
Even in a moment of silence, you're thinking to yourself “What are they going to say next? What are they going to do next? What am I going to say next? What am I going to do next?”
And that is a lost opportunity.
Because it is only in the listening of ourselves, and in the listening of others that we truly have an opportunity to create something new.
Our brains chatter the same thing about 85% of the time. By the time you're thirty, your personality is pretty well solidified. You have very similar vocal patterns. You have very similar mental pattern. Not that we don't learn new things; we do. But our personalities get kind of firmed up. And now, with all of the change happening, we have the ability and the opportunity to consider what we have been taking for granted. And maybe make some choices around making small shifts.
So, the small shift I'm asking you to make today is to give yourself more room to pause, and more room for silence.In your own life, and the conversations that you're having.
Before you respond to something somebody says —you're in a team meeting, you're in a conversation, you're running the meeting and you feel like you have to have all the answers— take a deep breath with everybody.
Invite everybody to take a pause together.“Let's just take a minute, and give this a little thought. Let's just take a moment and consider what was just said. Let's just take a moment to take a deep breath together. How are you guys doing?”
And let the moment settle before you get into a checklist, before you get into who's doing what and when and how, in that agile daily huddle rapid speed delivery that we all have.
So, that is what I'd love for you to consider today. in upping your leadership game. Particularly, your vocal leadership game, is the power of the pause.
There's a lot more ways that we can use pauses in our vocal leadership and in our delivery and in our presence to make a difference with our teams to engage, and inspire, and inform, and create beautiful, beautiful levels of performance in others as a leader.
We can talk about that if you want.Send me a message and we can talk more about that. You can learn more in some of the articles below.
And just enjoy as much as possible in all of the fracas that we're dealing with now.
Take a moment.
You deserve it. Your people deserve it.
We're All in This Together. Take care.
How much are you allowing yourself (and your team) to pause?
Tina Dietz is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, podcast producer, and influence marketing expert who has been featured on media outlets including ABC, Inc.com, Huffington Post and Forbes. Tina’s first podcast, The StartSomething Show, was named by INC magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs.
In 2016, Tina was the recipient of the Evolutionary Business Council MORE award and in 2017 she received the award for Outstanding Audio Company from The Winner’s Circle. She is also a member of the EBC leadership body and a founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Tina was also the lead interviewer in the podcasting documentary “The Messengers” and featured in the film.
Tina splits her time between the US and Costa Rica where she’s part of the leadership team building a community of conscious leaders called Vista Mundo.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
How are you doing? [01:01]
What’s the latest with you? [01:52]
Is the StartSomething Show podcast in hiatus? [03:11]
Where is the best place to connect with you? [04:04]
On being a stem from an entrepreneurial family. [05:04]
Is David in the picture still? [07:13]
In closing, is there anything else you’d like to share with our amazing audience? [11:58]
Join My Orgasmic Life Podcast on Spreaker or Spotify or Apple podcast or Google Podcast or iHeartRadioThere is a whole world of playful, educational, healing and safe experiences to be discovered at www.succulentliving.com and come frolic with Gaia on Social Media under Gaia MorrissetteHere is a great course to support your online discovery of how Pleasure Leads to ProfitTo learn more about my EPIC Co-Host Tina Dietz: Tina Dietz is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, podcast producer, influence and vocal leadership expert who has been featured on media outlets including ABC, Inc.com, Huffington Post, and Forbes. Tina's podcast, The StartSomething Show, was named by INC magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs. Tina’s company, Twin Flames Studios, amplifies the messages of leaders, experts and companies around the globe. Tina divides her time between the US and Costa Rica, where she’s part of a leadership team building a conscious community called Vista Mundo.
Coming to you live from the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, AZ! Tune in to listen to this episode as I sit down with Tina Dietz of StartSomething Creative Business Solutions at the event.(Podcast on DemandGen Radio, February 27, 2019)
Interested in learning more about audiobooks and howyou can be using audio in your business and career ?
Creating happiness can cause a lot of problems. Achieving your dreams can sometimes feel like a letdown. You spend months and years working toward a goal–like a climber ascending Mount Everest. But when you achieve it and reach the summit, that moment right after you feel the triumph, there is an emptiness.
“What now?” You start to think.
This is the plight of the high achiever and the pitfall of the pursuit of happiness.
When we (my family and myself) first moved to Costa Rica 5+ years ago, it was a triumph. We accomplished a 5-year goal in 3 years, paying off our debts and finding ourselves in a tropical country with oodles of time and resources at hand. Do you know what I did first thing when we got here?
I slept. A lot.
About two weeks later, I found myself waking up early in the morning with a knot in my stomach, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was restless, picking up doing one thing and putting it down again, dissatisfied and unsettled. One night after dinner, I stood up from the table, exclaiming, “Holy crap!” (I didn’t say crap) “I know what this is!”
“WHAT?” said my startled and confused family.
I threw my hands up and said, “I’m bored.”
Thinking about it that evening, I realized that I hadn’t probably felt boredom since I was in my early 20s, which is more than nunyabizness years ago. I had been too damn busy pursuing my Perfect Day. Now that the dream had been realized, I was at a loss.
Five years have passed since that first dinner table exclamation, and here is what I’d love for you to know as you bring your dreams into reality:
We are more familiar with the feelings associated with failure than we are with the ones related to success. As a result, having what you want can take some getting used to. Contentment, happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment are all muscles you need to flex in order to continue to create and have a life you love (and not sabotage yourself). The more you stop to appreciate your little successes and acknowledge yourself on a daily and weekly basis, the more you “exercise” those muscles.
You may be so used to having a long to-do list, constantly doing things for others, always working under a deadline, etc., that when all of that disappears and you have an open space before you, it can feel like a chasm. Create a daily practice of being quiet and listening to your thoughts to get your mind used to being calmer and quieter. Use any kind of meditation or relaxation practice you like, or even go for a quiet walk or swim. A daily practice of this kind also results in getting amazing ideas and insights in my experience.
When you find yourself feeling guilty or placeless because you don’t know what your next step is and you can choose anything you want, remember to breathe into giving yourself permission. Take 3-5 deep “letting go” breaths (add a sigh if you'd like; it deepens the relaxation response), and tell yourself something loving like: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Or, “All I need to do today is what I get done today.”
Make a “dream list” of all the things you'd love to learn or do or try or experience. Would you like to learn a new language? Have you always wanted to take dance lessons or learn to paint? Volunteer to work with animals, children, or a cause that’s near and dear to your heart? What are all the books you’ve always wanted to read? As you create more time and money freedom, start choosing items off this list to put into your life, rather than creating more busy-ness. Pleasure makes us more productive, not less.
Do you feel like you have a “fear of success” or find yourself overwhelmed, at loose ends, or not sure where your next priority is? Are you taking tons of action, but not getting the results you want? Reach out for a discovery session, and let’s create the life and business of your dreams.